You would not start form here

There is an international joke which goes something like this: "A sharp dressed man on a horse or car asks a farmer for directions to the big city who replies 'You wouldn't start from here'".  Much the same applies to a sustainable energy economy.

A street gas light (from somewhere posh?)

I recently came across a copy of "Everybody's Pocket Encyclopedia" dated 1891.   Somethings never change and others become irrelevant.  The list of 47 celebrities includes Prince Bismark who unified a number of German states into a single country and gave his name to at least one battleship.  Further down the pages is the actress Lilly Langtry who would have been a gift to today's Celeb magazines.  In the same spirit is a table of the  probability of a woman marrying at a given age and her weight for her height, evidently no such data was available for men.  In contrast there is a somewhat confusing method for estimating sidereal time and local time from longitude which implies the book was carried by people crossing continents (A lot of my family went west to America and East to Australia in the early part of the 20th century).  I'm guessing, but today few people are interested in the correct way to address a bishop.

At the end of the 19th century electricity was coming into general use but gas was a common fuel for lighting and coal provided warmth and the power for industry and transport.  The Encyclopedia's list of economic events is a bit patchy on electricity, for instance there is no reference to Nikola Tesla (who among other things developed the transformer) or to Charles Parson (steam turbines were a good way to turn generators).  However, the it has a few milestones for gas lighting:

• 1780 - The invention of the Argand Burner in Geneva
• 1786 - Lebon's Gas light invented
• 1792 - Murdoch's Gas Lighting Trial
• 1804 - Windor's Gas Patent
• 1807 - Clegg's Gas Works built
• 1813 - Westminster Bridge lit by Gas
• 1815 - Clegg;s Gas meter invented
• 1860 - Hugon's Gas Patent (Gas engine)

These events describe the production, use and commercialization of gas as a fuel.   From 1850, references to electricity become more frequent.  Whilst the displacement of gas lighting started in the latter years of the 19th century, the process did not approach completion until the 1920s, a span of approximately one generation.

There are plenty of fossils from the age of gas.  My own house has the remains of a network of gas pipes which supplied light fittings and geysers.  All this was installed before the advent of "Part P" regulations and some of the notches in the joists are well positioned.  Skips are a good source of social history, when a Victorian property is "gutted" gas pipes are often part of debris.

Edwardian fossils: The wall has a blanked off pipe showing the location of a gas lamp and the grate was part of the house's zoned heating system.

And my point is.....

The acceptance of a "new" technology which does not have to displace an old one, such as mobile phones, can be quite rapid, however, displacement can be a slower process.  In my view, the key technologies for the large scale adoption of sustainable energy sources are storage and management.  This includes devices such as the Tesla "PowerWall" and the internet of things both of which are recent innovations.  Utility scale wind turbines started appearing in the 1980's, solar PV became a mass market technology after 2000.  The table above spans a period of 80 years, these things take time, but if you were starting from scratch......

A very short social history of plumbing

Also, a personal and possibly inaccurate one.  I started last week hunched up over a toilet with my head between the rafters and ended it sitting on the toilet staring at a pressure gauge.  In the intervening week I had seen a century of plumbing and possibly social history.  The renovation of my house has got to the point where some plumbing needs to be dealt with before I can move on.

Lead Piping

The house was built in 1901, at that time a plumber earned about £2 per week or £100 per year and a "professional" e.g. doctor, vicar or solicitor might have received £400 per year.  This is a ratio of 4:1.  Today, plumbers are professionals and the equivalent ratio is 1:1 or less.  Assuming the relative cost of  materials to be the same, the proportion of a job represented by labor has increased.  I dredged these figures from some long forgotten book, so this theory hangs by a very slender thread.

Iron pipe blocked with rust and limescale

When the house was built all the things that used water were clustered together, albeit over two floors.  The piping was lead, bits of it are still embedded in the plaster.  I have never worked with lead but I'm guessing that it's a difficult material.  Whilst it is soft and malleable, it is thick walled and some form of bending tool would be needed to get it round corners and because it is heavy it may have taken two men to install, one to hold it in position and the other to fasten it.  Jointing would require some skill, too much heat from a blow lamp and the stuff would melt or collapse.  I have welded thin sheet metal and know the frustration of letting the work get too hot and watching a hole appear and then grow large.  So I'm guessing that plumbing in 1901 was slow, heavy and skilled work.

A screwed-up fragment of the Daily Mirror from 1949 with the remains of a Jane cartoon strip

Sometime around 1949, an attempt was made to replace some of the lead plumbing with iron piping.  I found a fragment of a "Jane" cartoon from the Daily Mirror dated 1949 which was probably associated with the installation of back boiler in what was then the kitchen.  From 1932 to 1959, Jane was forever saving the nation and losing her clothes with equal frequency, when I worked in a factory in the 1970s old men remembered her with affection/lust.  Iron is not an ideal material for a domestic hot water system, if for no other reason than it rusts. by 1980, much of this pipework was blocked with limescale and rust.  Unlike lead piping which could be bent into position, iron has to be got round corners with threaded elbows.  This required different skills from those needed for lead.  The pipe had to be cut with a hack saw, then each end of the pipe had to be threaded.  Yet again, I'm guessing, but it was probably the apprentice who did the cutting.  A few times in my life I have had to cut up bar stock for some reason or another and I know it to be hard, dull work.  The man who installed the iron pipe was highly skilled as he got it round brickwork and joists in a way that would be hard to do with copper.  It took me a week to remove this pipework.  I used a hole saw to get out the "hidden" lengths which could not be reached with a hack saw, the trick was to drill the pilot hole through the pipe, then use this to guide a hole saw which was half an inch larger than the pipe.

By 1980, the plumbing consisted of lead piping with repairs for frost damage and blocked iron pipe.  The owner decided that enough was enough and had the house re-plumbed with copper pipes.  This would have been a big job and one which I think was "done to a price".  The best routes had been taken by the iron pipes and it was probably cheaper put in 20 metres of copper pipe to take bath water a distance of 7 metres.  The boiler heated the hot water using a gravity feed system which was none to efficient, but all this was better than the original installation.    I have spectacularly made a mess of plumbing using copper pipe, my biggest mistake being not to practice soldering before I started the main job.  These days before I tackle anything big, I find something small to practice on which will either tell me I'm incompetent or teach me how to do it.  With the forgoing caveat, copper piping is reasonably easy to work with, it cuts easily, the fittings are not expensive and solder joints can be made quickly.  As a novice, I tend to use "Yorkshire" fittings which are more expensive than "end feed" but only require even heating with a gas torch.  No one seems to be using lead or iron pipe any more.

Copper pipe with insulation

My skills not being adequate to run copper along the path used by the iron pipe, I investigated "plastic" plumbing.  What limited experience and training I have is with metal, but I was told by several merchants, that this stuff is the future and it was only the "old" blokes that won't use it, so I decided to give it a go.  It's more expensive than copper, but allowing for the need for supports every half metre or less, it is very quick to work with and has a 50 year guarantee (I am an  "old bloke", so I may not be able validate that).  I would not have pressure tested a copper pipe, but I did with the plastic and it held 20 psi for 15 minutes, what pressure drop there was, was probably due to the attachment of the pressure gauge which might have been a bit flaky.  The job was more like running cables than plumbing.  This takes me back to my starting point, if labour is expensive, then productivity becomes important and this seems to be the driving force behind the enthusiasm for plastic plumbing.

Plastic plumbing (before making good the plaster)

At the time of writing, I have yet to connect the pipework to tanks and taps, what I'm hoping for is a much lower heat loss as the water moves from the hot water cylinder to the taps.

Images added after original post

This lead tee join supplied the bathroom with water from the main

Small Things

Some time back a journalist friend got to visit a nuclear facility, he not only came back with some good stories but got to wear a hard hat.  For whatever reason, for the past couple of years I've become my own builder and have been renovating my house.  The project has got to the stage where not much more can be done until the plumbing has been dealt with.

It seems that the current system is at least the third version.  The house was build in 1901 with an

extensive network of gas pipes which supplied mantles around the house and geysers in the bathroom and scullery.  A geyser is not a bad solution to the hot water problem, it heats water where it is going to be used, thus if you want 20 liters of bathwater, that's all you pay for.  I suspect that the original device discharged it's combustion products into the bathroom as there is not evidence of a vent to the outside world.    The current concern would be risk of carbon monoxide poisoning but the original inhabitants probably appreciated a warm bathroom.

Around 1950 someone thought that central heating was worth a try.  I'm guessing that the original solid fuel range was replaced by some coal burning object.  The geyser was dispensed with and bathroom was supplied with hot water from a tank in the kitchen via iron pipes.  If this arrangement bought any benefits they were short lived because rust and calcium deposits soon obstructed the flow of hot bath water.  Whilst the choice of pipe material was less than ideal (was there an alternative at the time?), it was installed with great skill along the shortest possible route.

By 1980, the house must have been inhabited by cold, unwashed people.  Someone decided enough was enough and installed a gas fired central heating system with copper pipes.  At that time energy was cheap and labor expensive.  The logical pipe routes were taken up by thick iron pipes, the alternative route from boiler to bathroom required a run of 50 meters of 3/4 inch pipe. which required approximately 15 liters to fill.  To get enough warm water to fill the basin for a shave or make-up removal resulted in running about 25 liters of hot water.  The hot water cylinder has a capacity of 100 liters and is heated by a 20 kw gas boiler (approx. cost: £2000) .  To summarize, the most energy efficient/environmental friendly way of shaving or doing the washing up is to boil a kettle (approx. cost: £20).

The big project is to reduce the pipe run from 50 meters to 10 meters.  Will it make a big difference?  Probably not but it will make a small one, both gas and water consumption should be reduced, maybe by 3 - 5 kwh/day and 25 liters/day respectively.  However, scale these saving up to a million homes (the UK has more than 20 million of them) and the reduction might be significant.  A plant producing 5,000,000 kwh is the type of place where you have to wear a hard hat.